Today we’re announcing the arrival of a key new figure at NewsWhip – our first President of North American operations, and Chief Revenue Officer.
NewsWhip has big news today – we’re announcing the arrival of the first President of NewsWhip’s North American Operations and Chief Revenue Officer.
Brett Lofgren joins us from leading content marketing platform Contently, where he also served as CRO. He has 20 years of experience in digital media, having held C-Level roles at publisher monetisation platform 33Across, Epic Advertising, and Yahoo!, among others.
Brett will be responsible for directing overall growth and revenue strategy for NewsWhip, helping us get a message of how NewsWhip’s technology helps brands and publishers to grow their audience using social data.
He’ll oversee our sales, marketing and customer success departments, and our customers can expect big improvements in how we support them in growing their audiences and impact in the coming months.
Brett’s arrival comes on the back of our $6.2 million Series A funding round, and the launch of our Analytics platform in February, which signals a major new stage in NewsWhip’s growth.
Here, Brett explains his view of how social media has disrupted distribution models for publishers and brands, and where NewsWhip fits in.
I have spent my entire career focused on communication.
How brands communicate their product and services through advertising, or how they tell their story through content. All of these marketing initiatives are backed by some functional ROI measurement. With that said, the rate of change with digital publishing during the last 10 years is unprecedented. Many established brands have gone extinct, some have tentatively adopted and a few have become the modern pioneers of communication.
We live in a “now” economy, where orders appear at your doorstep within minutes, booking a house, taxi or a dinner reservation is one click away and anyone with an iPhone has instant access to two million plus new articles published every day. Therein lies the challenge. While the average individual spends half of their waking hours consuming media, the average attention time for the online reader is now roughly 8 seconds. To top it off, they are presented with over 3,000 messages per day.
The human brain needs a way to categorize information regarding companies, products, news and stories that is almost instantaneous and universal. In order for brands and publishers to be successful in this ever-changing universe (outside of being real), they must be swift, meticulous and engaging.
The unifying layer to all of this is the intelligence. Having the directional data to know what to do, when to do it and how to say it (or not).
When I was introduced to the folks at NewsWhip in 2016, I uncovered a technology that can reveal the stories, people and formats that will win attention and predict story performance. This provides publishers with the insight and ROI predictability required for any modern-day storyteller. In a world for infinite competition for human attention, I viewed this as a new and necessary requirement for audience growth.
For someone who has spent his career being commercially focused, I saw unlimited use-cases for this type of intelligence. Brands and publishers will always need to communicate with their audiences and here lies the foundation that ties it all together.
Plain and simply, I needed to become involved with this pioneering technology company.
Find out more about how NewsWhip helps industry-leading publishers, agencies and brands to create and execute data-driven content strategies.
